Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

"there is no Blue in Korean" title is very misleading. As is written in the fine article, they certainly have a different word for what in English is commonly called red, blue, and green. It's not lumped together for example so that blue and green would be the same word in Korean.

The interactive color maps are excellent.

View on HN

There is 푸르다 which can refer to green or blue. Specifically “맑은 가을 하늘이나 깊은 바다, 싱싱한 풀의 빛깔과 같이 밝고 선명하다”.

I have no idea what’s up with that article title though. Clearly there is 파랗다/파란색 etc? Edit: the title should be “languages don’t map colors exactly the same and can have more or less words for a color” would be a better title. But I think most people already know that.

IIRC, 青 in Japanese also can refer to either blue or green, though they also have a dedicated word for green (緑) and that is the one that usually gets used... this can catch people unawares when translating though.

Japanese traffic lights also have the colors red (赤), yellow (黄) and "blue" (青), where the last one is really somewhere between blue and green.

Hangul also has the trait that green traffic lights are considered "blue". Really made my head spin as a kid.

It's interesting that 푸르다 (blue/green) uses a very similar character: 靑, with 青 listed as a variant. Red is the same, 赤 (붉을 적) and yellow (누를 황 / 황색) uses 黃/黄.

Green (녹색) uses 綠. There's also 초록 which is 草綠.

赤: https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/ad2ad1893b5c49f8ab...

黃: https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/17a2b69699474d5bb8...

https://theconversation.com/languages-dont-all-have-the-same...

And various versions of the article

https://npg.si.edu/object/posts_d6c837d227c59da175620b8eaa18...

https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc5635863

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10785/tab-article-info

The essence of it is "how consistent are our names for colors?" Given an image if I point to this image and ask you the color for the N4 spot - what do you say?

https://images.theconversation.com/files/186280/original/fil...

I'm going to say "Blue". How many other people (who speak English natively) answer it the same?

Aside: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ is also rather interesting in that domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com